GERANOS – Subcultures of the Sun (Movement III): Riccardo Arena Transforms Casa degli Artisti into a Living, Ever-Changing Laboratory Exhibition

Casa degli Artisti inaugurates GERANOS – Subcultures of the Sun (Movement III) by Riccardo Arena, a project that transcends the boundaries of the traditional exhibition format by transforming the ground floor of the Casa into a living, processual organism in constant metamorphosis.

Riccardo Arena, TEOMAMA- The Hollow Figure, Courtesy dell'artista e di Casa degli Artisti

After its first two iterations at Monte Verità and the Museo Elisarion in Locarno, Arena now arrives in Milan with the most collective and participatory phase of his long-term research into myth, archives, and the processes of collective imagination.

The exhibition takes shape as an environment in flux: not a space presenting finished results, but a place where thought materialises in real time before the viewer’s eyes. Archival materials, diagrams, visual notes, artefacts, installations, and performative interventions coexist as elements of an unstable landscape, continually reshaped by relationships, rewritings, and new connections. Processuality becomes an essential part of the experience itself, inviting visitors to immerse themselves in an open laboratory.

At the core of the project lies the research initiated by Arena in 2021 together with curator Noah Stolz, rooted in the ritual dance of the Geranos, the choreography that—according to myth—Theseus performed upon emerging from the labyrinth. For Arena, the spiral movement of the Geranos, interpreted by scholar Károly Kerényi as a form of embodied knowledge, becomes a key to exploring symbolic genealogies, forms of understanding, and non-linear readings of cultural phenomena.

Riccardo Arena, GERANOS Choreography of a Mental Landscape - Movimento I_0_1, Courtesy dell'artista e di Casa degli Artisti

GERANOS draws from a rich constellation of cultural references: the utopian and experimental legacy of Monte Verità, the vast iconographic archive of the Eranos Foundation preserved at the Warburg Institute, and the collections of the Anthropological Museum of Mexico City, studied by the artist during a residency at UNAM. For Arena, archives are living organisms—not static repositories of memory but structures of thought to be reactivated through association, transformation, and imaginative drift.

Riccardo Arena, BULLROARER - Aeroacoustic Shadows Notations, Courtesy dell'artista e di Casa degli Artisti

The Milan chapter marks the most communal moment of this research. Arena works alongside a curatorial collective, researchers, students, and invited artists, shaping an exhibition apparatus that evolves, expands, and generates ever-new constellations of meaning. The project will also lead to the creation of an archival fund destined for the MA*GA Museum: a living, eccentric, unclassifiable archive documenting both the artist’s practice and the intricate network of materials that nourished it.

Casa degli Artisti

Corso Garibaldi 89A / Via Tommaso da Cazzaniga 20121, Milano

Date

10 dicembre 2025 - 11 gennaio 2026